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Bill Schultz

This essay was written by a self-described agnostic as a response to those individuals who define in a broad sense, such that anyone who is not a theist is automatically an atheist. Schultz argues that the rules of inference from Classical logic (meaning the logic as defined by Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell) cannot be used in discourse about unexperienced truth values. Schultz concludes, accordingly, that agnosticism "is, in fact, the only valid choice in such circumstances under the rules of inference applicable to discourse based upon the evaluation of hypothetical (unexperienced) data."

It is that the "argument to design" and the other "intelligent design" arguments do not in any way support any assertion of the existence of some supernatural deity. If an atheist willingly suspends his or her disbelief, and totally accepts all of the factual assertions in support of these design arguments, that would not turn the atheist into a theist. The reason this is true is because no provable fact regarding the alleged "intelligent design" of our universe requires any supernatural phenomena to have occurred in order for that fact to be true. Instead, as I shall clearly show, it is entirely consistent with what we currently know about our universe for some external but natural intelligence to have "designed" our universe to be what it is. Such intelligence would be mighty indeed, but it would still be just another powerful alien, or a group of such aliens, and not in any way a god or gods.

The O'Hair essay is, unfortunately, just the "tip of the iceberg" of anti-agnostic bigotry among the most "fundamentalist" of atheists. In this essay, I've hopefully shown that this bigotry is based on a total misunderstanding of how the word "agnostic" came to be invented, and what that word was origionally intended to mean. It's an unfortunate fact of life that other people will frequently twist our words to mean things they were never intended to mean.